Madness!

Kim Fabricius's post on William Blake is worth clicking through to, if only for the image of a good Blake painting, but what really got me thinking was this paragraph:

“Chesterton declared: ‘Critics say his [Blake’s] visions were false because he was mad. I say he was mad because his visions were true.’ Absolutely! ‘Mad’ in the way St. John the Divine was mad… ‘Mad’ in a way that neither the legalism of conservative Christians, nor the reasonableness of the liberals, can comprehend. Such is the impoverishment of the contemporary Christian imagination for which the Bible is either an inerrant rulebook or a religious resource book, but not, as it was for Blake, an inspired and inspiring narrative for re-configuring the world.”

A semester of math and logic that ends with an effort to guest-write for a blog with really smart readers will make one into a reasonable person indeed. I look at my recent writing and it's all I see. Sure, I took a class on critical theory, but the professor was a pragmatist, so I kept my distance…

Reasonableness—what a virtue! The reasonable personality, the one that always discusses, that looks at things from all angles, that never lets things get out of hand, that declines to speak of what it doesn't know, that plans for every contingency… But there are few figures more pitiable (or comic, depending on the context) than the reasonable man treading beyond his depth: the professor in the haunted house, the psychoanalyst who has been left by his wife, the man who thinks he is going to shoot Liberty Valence. Here, reasonableness is profoundly, utterly irrational.

Madness—vision—imagination—this is how you respond to the full splendor and terror of the world!